ABSTRACT Traditional historical chronicles from island Southeast Asia are crucial sources for our understanding of the region’s pre-modern history. These chronicles were produced in contexts of textual practice that are unfamiliar to modern historians, which can result in erroneous interpretations of their historical meaning. In this article, I present a method for reading the region’s chronicles that treats them as conglomerate texts, which consist of fragments of earlier texts that have been combined into new wholes. I illustrate the usefulness of this interpretive approach by examining the Pararaton, one of the main sources for the history of the late medieval kingdom of Java with its capital at Majapahit. The key findings of this article are a revised textual history of the Pararaton, new data from six unpublished manuscripts of the text, and a re-evaluation of the dynastic chronology of the Javanese kingdom between 1389 and 1429. These findings show that reading chronicles as conglomerate texts not only sheds light on their textual evolution, but also improves our understanding of the historical realities they refer to.

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如何阅读一本编年史

摘要 东南亚岛屿的传统历史编年史是我们了解该地区前现代历史的重要来源。这些编年史是在现代历史学家不熟悉的文本实践背景下产生的，这可能导致对其历史意义的错误解释。在这篇文章中，我提出了一种阅读该地区编年史的方法，该方法将它们视为综合文本，这些文本由已组合成新整体的早期文本的片段组成。我通过检查 Pararaton 来说明这种解释方法的有用性，Pararaton 是中世纪晚期爪哇王国历史的主要来源之一，其首都位于满者伯夷。本文的主要发现是修订后的 Pararaton 文本历史，来自六份未发表文本手稿的新数据，